In death, Liu Xiaobo’s name has gained a new power even beyond that
which it achieved in life. Liu was China’s sole winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize, and was in prison for pieces of writing that the Communist Party
considered tantamount to a rebellion. A few weeks ago, the Party revealed
that Liu was suffering from late-stage liver cancer, nearly past the point of treatment. He was moved from his cell to a guarded bed at
the First Hospital of China Medical University, where he was barred from speaking out or going abroad for treatment. He died on Thursday, much as he had lived: confined and incommunicado but forever unbroken.

Liu wrote seventeen books, as well as hundreds of essays, poems, and
screeds. By the time I met him, in Beijing, in 2007, he had done three
stints in jail, beginning with his conviction for “counterrevolutionary
propaganda and incitement” for his activities as a leader of
demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. The Party had labelled him a “black
hand”—a hidden mastermind of disorder—but, as I wrote of Liu, in a
book on China, he embraced the term as a “medal of honor.” In his view, it was one of the few things he could retain behind bars. In a jailhouse poem,
he wrote, “Besides a lie / I own nothing.”

He was jailed for the fourth and final time the following year, for
co-authoring a petition that called for nineteen reforms, including
independent courts and elections for higher office. He was charged with
“inciting subversion of state power” and sentenced to eleven years in
prison.

Liu’s case now takes its place in the history books in a manner that
does a disservice to the ordinary men and women of China: he is the
first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die under confinement since Carl von
Ossietzky, a German pacifist and an opponent of the Nazis, who died in
1938. Liu and von Ossietzky already shared a prize-related distinction—neither had
been allowed to receive their Nobels in person—and their pairing on
the pages of history is both correct and tragic: Liu’s countrymen are
not Nazis, but his government neglected every opportunity to rescue him, or to avoid allowing itself and its people to be tarnished by the comparison.

Around the world, Liu will be remembered as a moral giant: “The Mandela
of our age,” in the words of Nicholas Kristof; a “compatriot for writers all over the world who struggle against tyranny,” as PEN America put it.
The avatar of the “Other China: the China of possibility, hope and humanity,” Geremie Barmé, the prominent Australian Sinologist, wrote in
a tribute shortly before Liu’s death.

Inside China, alas, the grief will be conspicuously muted. Some fellow
dissidents, admirers, writers, and activists will honor him in secret,
at risk of being arrested for any public demonstration of tribute. But
the loss will go largely unrecognized by the general public because his
work had been barred from publication for years, and he was
systematically demonized as a traitor intent on subverting China’s
hard-won prosperity. That was always a slur.

Inevitably, some in the West will think that honoring Liu Xiaobo is an act of offense against China (or, more
practically, a potential risk to relationships with the government).
That’s a mistake. Honoring Liu is an act of dedication to China at its
best. He was, to the end, unwilling to renounce his principled
commitment to China’s constitution—to the freedoms enshrined in law
but unprotected in practice. If you never had a chance to meet him, it
was easy to misread him as a cynic. On the contrary, in person, Liu
could be unnervingly optimistic. On that day when I met him, in 2007, at a
teahouse near his apartment, he told me that as China became
stronger and more connected to the world, he imagined that the “current
regime might become more confident.” He went on, “It might become
milder, more flexible, more open.” In that prediction, he was, for now,
wrong, and he paid with his life.

For those who wonder if the world could’ve done more to help Liu in
life, there is one final opportunity to celebrate his aspirations for
freedom. His widow, Liu Xia, has been confined for years without charges,
under forms of house arrest. It’s not clear what will happen to her now,
but the world must demand—often, and repeatedly—that she be
permitted to regain a normal life. Liu, behind bars, once wrote of his
love for her. “Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and
penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my
skin, warming every cell of my body . . . and filling every minute of my
time in prison with meaning.”